


Love of the Game

by allthegoodnamesaretakendammit



Series: The Spirit Is Willing [6]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Age Difference, Canon-Typical Violence, Confessions, Drama, Enemies to Lovers, Family Bonding, Family Drama, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, M/M, New Relationship, Older Man/Younger Man, Pompous Pep, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23757382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit/pseuds/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit
Summary: Shit very, very gently hits the fan. It’s more of a love-tap, really.
Relationships: Danny Fenton/Vlad Masters
Series: The Spirit Is Willing [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/844647
Comments: 36
Kudos: 256





	Love of the Game

“—So then I wrote back, _I saved you from drowning in slime and you thank me with revenge cake?_ Because I couldn’t just let him have the last word, you know? And he said, _All’s fair, Daniel._ ” He does a passable impersonation of Vlad, smug and with an accent like he’s got money in his mouth. Sam is sitting at the foot of his bed, frowning but nodding along slowly. Tucker anxiously pivots back and forth in Danny’s desk chair, his hand thoughtfully rubbing over his chin when Danny says, “So it turns out we were both slowly hoarding these huge collections of stupid notes from each other, and then we started texting and stuff—”  
  
It’s weird because he’s explaining stuff that he only just remembered yesterday, but telling them makes the memories real somehow. They’d started the evening off with Sam and Tucker airing their concerns. And their complaints. And then their frustrations. And then their concerns again. 

Then, _then,_ Danny told them the whole long, strange story. By the end of it, all he can say is: “You guys are my best friends, and the fact that you’re upset... actually means a lot to me. Because I get how this looks from the outside. And you make a lot of good points. But I feel how I feel. And I don’t think that’s going to change.”  
  
The room is quiet for a while. The air conditioner kicks on, its sputtering sounding enormous in the quiet room. Then Tucker sighs so hard that he has to tilt his head back to let it out, and his hat nearly falls off. He’s gripping the arms of the computer chair hard when he says to Sam, “I can’t stay mad at him! Can you stay mad at him?”  
  
Sam crosses her arms, leans back against the foot of Danny’s bed, and says rebelliously, “Yep.”  
  
Danny hangs his head and says for the fifth time this afternoon, “Alright, let me have it.”  
  
“Look, if you didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, then why would you hide it?” And wow, Sam should be a lawyer or something because that makes him sound guilty as fuck.  
  
Danny shifts in his seat at the head of the bed, trying to get his thoughts in order. “I’m not _not_ ashamed. He’s, like, a million years older than me and I—more than _anybody_ —should know better than to get close to him. It just kind of... happened. That’s why I hid it, I guess. Because it makes me look stupid—like I’m being played. I’m not. I _know_ I’m not. But I felt embarrassed and confused and, honestly, I’m still confused. But now that I’m in, I really don’t want out.”  
  
Sam gives him a long, hard look. Then she falls sideways against the bedspread, saying to the ceiling, “Okay, you’re right. I can’t stay mad at him.”  
  
“Toldja,” Tucker says through a mouthful of Danny’s apology beef jerky.  
  
Sam’s apology pentagram charm bracelet rattles on her wrist when she throws up her arms, yelling, “He’s just so—!”  
  
“Smitten,” Tucker finishes for her, gesturing with his jerky for an extra flourish. Sam throws up her arms again, as if to offer a silent, _No shit, Sherlock._  
  
Danny feels his cheeks turn bright pink, and he squirms in his seat again, saying, “Hey, now...”  
  
Sam flaps a hand at him and says, “Nah, you totally are.” Then she leans on one elbow and asks, “What are you going to tell Jazz?”  
  
“I wish I knew,” Danny tells her as his cheeks cool, and he glances down at his phone where five new emails from his sister have piled up. Say what you want about her, but she knew him too well.  
  
“There’s no winning that one,” Tucker says sagely through another mouthful, and honestly, he has a pretty good point. Stalling hasn’t worked. Lying would only hold up for a little while, even if it was a good lie. The truth would be messy as hell. 

Jazz would want to know _everything._ She’d want to read all those sticky notes and demand every scrap of context and ask what angle they’d been stuck at on the bathroom mirror. She’d want to know when their first kiss was and when they’d last fought and if he felt pressured to stay involved with Vlad just to keep him from doing anything particularly villainous and gosh, Danny, this whole thing seems like an abusive relationship just waiting to happen. But she’d ask those things because she loves him and that’s how she loves people—by worrying them into the fucking ground. 

“I’m gonna tell her,” Danny realizes out loud.  
  
Sam smiles at him—one of those rare, honest little smiles that she gives when she’s really, really proud of someone. “Good,” is all she says, which is almost covered up by the sound of Tucker saying, “Sure as shit wish you’d told us.”  
  
Danny rubs the back of his neck, feeling it in his bones when he says, “I’m sorry. I should have been a better friend.”  
  
A sudden punch in the arm catches him off-guard. It’s a hard one, so he knows it was Sam. He glares at her, says, “Ow,” and rubs it pointedly. 

She’s still smiling when she says, “Quit the pity party. We’ve got stuff to do—only got a month left before we ship out for school.”

With that, they all stand and stretch, and Danny concludes by way of saying, “Yeah, well, Jazz is supposed to come home in a couple of weeks. I guess I’ll tell her then.”

Tucker seems skeptical in a lighthearted sort of way, heading for the stairs with the call of, “Whatever you say, badger boy!”

“ _Dude._ ”

Then they all pile downstairs to watch a horror flick and polish off cold pizza along with what’s left of his gyro from Athena’s. Feta fell out the back of it at every jump-scare, but if that’s the price of friendship, then he’s willing to pay it.

*

Predictably, Jazz proves far, far harder to convince.

Their parents are out on one of their ultra-rare date nights, where they’ll probably get kicked out of a nice Italian place, make a pit stop at a promising-looking graveyard, and be back home before nine. So Danny lays it all out for Jazz as soon as their parents are out the door. Given all of the yelling that follows, waiting for privacy was definitely the right move. The story takes a lot longer to tell because Jazz keeps interrupting him to scream-whisper, “Danny Fenton, _I cannot believe you!_ ”

By the time he gets all the way through it, the clock reads 8:36PM, the living room is tense as hell, and she looks like she doesn’t want to be on the same planet as him, let alone the same couch. 

And in that silence, they finally arrive at the real reason that Danny always puts off talking about his feelings with Jazz: the parts of himself he ends up confronting in the process. Even when he was just talking _about_ her with Sam, it was true.

“I think…” he says slowly, only realizing it as the words tumble out, “there’s some part of me… that expects to outlive everybody but him.” Jazz bites her lip and says nothing, refusing to even blink, as though that would reveal the truth and the truth would shatter him. “Maybe it’s selfish, or too easy, but I don’t _want_ to be his enemy anymore. I don’t want to be hated. I don’t want to be alone.”

Jazz rubs deep circles over her temples, and even talking about aging is enough to suddenly make her look older than her years. “I feel for you, Danny, I do. But it’d be bad enough if you just wanted to be his friend.”

Danny jumps on that, hoping to make some kind of headway here. “Would it really? He’s still a person. Super flawed, yeah, but everybody needs--somebody.”

The phrasing--which admittedly could have been better--sets her off. “You can’t trust him, Danny! We _know_ that—”

“He hasn’t tried to clone me for months. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“Just how low do you plan on setting the bar for him?”

“As low as it takes!” Danny yells, raising his voice for the first time all night. Deep inside, he can feel his heart pounding in his chest and his throat going tight. Jazz’s eyes are wide, and for the first time all night, she doesn’t have an immediate, cutting retort. “I care about him. A _lot._ I didn’t plan for this, but it is what it is. _He_ is who he is. And I want him in my life.” 

Jazz’s eyes suddenly look wet and he is briefly overcome with terror, thinking that he’s made her cry. But all she does is let her head drop practically into her own lap and take a deep sigh through her nose. She takes another deep breath, then another. “If anyone could change him,” she says quietly, “it would be you.”

It’s the first crack in the case she’d made against him all night, so he scoots closer to her on the couch, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says lightly, “Aren’t you the one always saying that you shouldn’t get into a relationship hoping to change someone?”

“I didn’t mean superpowered violent narcissists.” Then she sighs, her shoulders drooping even further as she admits, “It doesn’t make sense for him to play the long game here. If he really wanted to control you, he would’ve just taken advantage while you didn’t remember him. He wouldn’t have gone out of his way to restore your memory, and he certainly wouldn’t have tried to make you _feel better_ about it afterward.” 

Her arms are crossed and she’s still frowning, but it’s a frown that says _I don’t like this,_ not a frown that says _blood will be spilled this day._

“We can talk about this as much as you want,” he says—words that he’s never said to her in his entire life. She arches a brow, hearing the irony in it, too. “But Mom and Dad are gonna be home in, like, five minutes, so let’s continue this over the phone later, okay?”

“I’m taking you up on that,” she warns him. 

And it really is a warning, but to him, right now, it’s more reassuring than anything because it means she’s still reasoning with him, not shooting on sight or something. “Thanks for hearing me out,” Danny sighs, as if he hadn’t spent the first twenty minutes convincing her to not immediately go hunt down Vlad with the Jack o’ Nine Tails in hand. 

As it was, he’d only been able to slow her down because it had to charge first. And then there was another twenty minutes that they’d spent debating whether or not he’d been brainwashed. 

There’s a gentle look in her eye when she puts her hand over his and says, “I’m glad you told me.” He must look surprised because she waspishly amends, “I’m not happy that _this_ is what you had to tell me, but I’m glad I finally know what’s going on.” 

“Yeah, I mean, those emails were getting pretty blackmail-y.”

She gives him a dirty look and says in all seriousness: “What am I supposed to do when you keep secrets like this?” 

“Yeah, fair,” he says, because. Couldn’t argue with that, really. Light flares and wanes behind the closed blinds, the flash of headlights going by. Any one of them could be their parents, but for now, they just sit in the living room listening to the cars rumble past.

“What is it…” she begins as she looks over at him again, seeming genuinely curious. “What is it you see in him?” 

Danny shrugs. “He gets me, you know?” 

She shakes her head and says, “Little brother,” as if that’s the only answer she has. He’s never heard anyone else call their sibling that. She’s a little like Vlad that way—insisting on calling him one thing when everybody calls him something else.

He listens to the cars go by and watches the fluorescent light repaint Jazz’s face time and again. At last, he feels safe enough to ask, “Are we good?”

She bumps him on the arm where his bruise from Sam is almost gone and answers, “We’re good.”

They share a smile, but Danny knows it isn’t over because that just isn’t how family works. She’d probably have even _more_ questions once she’d slept on it and had more time to stress over it. She’d probably text him during psych lectures and ask him if any of the following signs of intimate partner violence applied to him, with a snapshot of her textbook included. And what the ever-loving fuck is he supposed to _tell his parents?_

She slaps his cheek as soft as could be, patting it twice to get him out of his head. “I said,” she repeats firmly, “ _we’re good._ ” 

And they were. 

*

“—So then I asked her, ‘Are we good?’ And she said we were and, I mean, I think she handled it pretty well, all things considered.”

Vlad leans back in his deck chair, his voice molten with approval when he says, “Excellent work, Daniel. It seems you’re a better negotiator than we thought.”

Danny pretends to shrug it off, feeling very proud of himself underneath it all. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d done it: he’d cleared things with the people whose opinions mattered most. And he couldn’t help but think that they’d all be better for it.

“Anyway, she said she’d stop busting my balls about it for now if I keep this on me at all times.” He hefts the Fenton Anti-Creep Stick out of his backpack. It’s just a baseball bat with the word Fenton on it. It isn’t even metal.

Vlad eyes it skeptically and takes a measured sip of Scotch that makes Danny’s throat burn just to watch because _fuck_ he’s hot. “You could try,” is all Vlad says, and goddamn if that doesn’t sound like a challenge. Maybe sparring could be on the agenda tonight…

Well, probably not, since the next thing Vlad does is check his wristwatch and say, “Is it that time already?” He quickly stands, plops a Packers hat on Danny’s head, and bundles him onto the couch in the den. They spend the next four hours watching a Packers game, and Vlad spends the last three of those sitting on the literal edge of his seat. Only halfway interested, Danny marks the time according to Vlad’s eruptions, hand-wringing, and the least-explicit expletives known to humankind. 

In the first quarter, a player fumbles the ball. “ _Butter biscuits,_ ” Vlad hisses. 

Five minutes later, one of the Packers made to tackle another player, and he’s egging him on: “Right in the cheesemaker!” 

“Fudge buckets!” is his answer to the penalty given to a linebacker, pounding his fist on the arm of his couch.

In the second half, the ref makes a bad call. “CHEESE AND CRACKERS,” he roars.

Danny thinks it’s cute, watching him pace during commercial breaks and mutter directions to the coach and explode into movement when the Packers make that final touchdown and win in one sudden flurry of whistles and cheering crowds and the victorious blaring of horns. Vlad looks so _happy,_ his eyes are lit up, and he’s wearing a grin so big that it usually meant evil, evil things. 

He wrapped an arm around Danny to shake him by the shoulders, crowing, “Oh, they were marvelous, my boy! A close game, yes, but they persevered! A Hail Mary for the history books--” and that’s when Danny had a realization. 

It was stupid, simple, refreshing: winning was good.

**Author's Note:**

> Honey, I’m hooooome! 
> 
> Next part is all porn. I’ll just go ahead and say it: you’re welcome. It’s… some of my better work. And a big thank-you to Ro the Spooder and ariinya14! Betas make the motherfucking world go round.


End file.
